“Barfi!”… Sweet memories

Even before the first frame comes up in Barfi!, the director Anurag Basu sets up the mood of what’s to follow. A cheerful song – very much in the style of Pritam’s superb soundtrack, whose accordion-backed tunes and lazy-Sunday vocals suggest French provincial music as performed by Cliff Richards – informs us the film is about to begin, and can we please not put up our feet on the seats in front, and that we please keep our mobiles and kids in the “off” mode. Stentorian warnings – Don’t disturb your neighbours! Don’t ruin their movie experience! – are dusted with sugar and delivered with a wink and a smile, and that is how the movie works too, packaging its profound sentimentality in a boxful of good cheer. Barfi! unfolds as a rollicking ride, and it’s only when we pause to reflect on what we’ve just seen that we realise what a sad little story this is, and yet, how we haven’t been held at gunpoint and asked to shed bucketfuls of tears.

Another director would’ve been tempted to pick up that gun. Just look at the juicy melodramatic contrivances in this story we’re smiling through. There’s Murphy, aka Barfi (Ranbir Kapoor), who cannot hear and speak; his mother died when he was a child. There’s Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra), with her own set of developmental problems; and she’s saddled with a gambling-prone father and a perpetually soused mother (it sounds worse in Hindi, “sharaaabi maa, juaari baap”). Then, completing the loose love triangle that forms the basis of the plot, there’s Shruti (Ileana D’Cruz), who’s engaged to Ranjeet (Jishu Sengupta) while fighting a sweet tooth for Barfi. (And later, when Barfi falls for Jhilmil, Shruti is forced to cheer from the sidelines. She’s now excluded from their love, just like she’s excluded poor Ranjeet from hers.) Did I mention that Barfi’s father (a wonderful Akash Khurana, looking like Parikshit Sahni’s younger sibling), a chauffeur, suffers kidney failure after being discharged from service, and to pay for these expenses, Barfi is forced to consider kidnapping and bank robbery? (Of course he will not hear the bank’s alarm going off.)

Basu doesn’t entirely do away with melodrama. The moment where Barfi goes after Shruti and stumbles and falls is reminiscent of the climax of Moondram Pirai/Sadma. And before this, when he comes to her house to ask for her hand, her father thinks he’s after a measly donation – that’s when Barfi sees Shruti with Ranjeet. Outside, the traditional manifestations of melodrama make their appearance – faint peals of thunder; incessant rain; the unspooled chain on Barfi’s cycle. (He cannot even speed away from his humiliation) He’s stuck, and she’s behind him, and so he begins to scream at her, whimpering like a tightly squeezed rubber duck. But before things get too serious, he composes himself, asks her to smile, and leaves. Barfi’s relationship with his father – his sole surviving relative – is sentimentalised when we see him sleeping on his father’s paunch, which rises and falls. But once again, before things get too serious, we’re encouraged to smile when Barfi asks his father if he has passed gas, and doesn’t leave until he has. (The sweetness of the scene reminds us of unembarrassed flatulent elders in our own families.)

Barfi! plays like Koshish crossed with Charlie Chaplin’s silent features, whose heartbreaking moments were leavened by comedy. When Barfi sees Shruti, he reaches into his shirt and extracts his heart, which he proceeds to place at her feet. After a second’s pause, she kicks it back towards him. She points to her ring, and then he disappears, only to reappear atop a clock tower. Our immediate thought is that he’s going to jump – or at least threaten to do so, like Dharmendra in Sholay – but what follows is a warm illustration of his determination to look at the bright side. Ranbir Kapoor brings Barfi to life with an astonishingly modulated performance that’s as much about physicality as physiognomy. He reminds us, inevitably, of his grandfather’s version of the little tramp, but also of the other stars in his family. We see in him Shammi Kapoor’s Tourette’s-inspired vitality, Shashi Kapoor’s shy and quietly civilised wooing routines, and Rishi’s Kapoor’s livewire spontaneity, where the scene is juiced by a couple of kilovolts just by his showing up. (There may be a tangential nod to Bobby in a moment that involves sunlight reflected by mirror shards.)

Ranbir Kapoor is in practically every scene, and had this performance not clicked, the film would have turned into a laughingstock. And there was reason to believe that this performance wasn’t a given – in films like Rockstar, when asked to play a wide-eyed innocent, Kapoor came off like a village idiot. That’s not something you want to sit through for two-and-a-half hours. And it helps that Barfi has his dark sides too. He’s not just someone who’ll take a sneaky bite from a chocolate bar in a kid’s hand, but also a child-man who drinks and smokes. Basu is right not to linger on these vices – they are just shadowy complements to an otherwise sunny disposition. The character is identified through a recurring tic of combing his hair carefully, just like Jhilmil’s tendency to loop her pinkie around the fingers of those she trusts. In the battle of the handicaps, Priyanka Chopra has the more difficult role. The character stays largely in the background, and we need to register a strong enough presence to compete with Shruti for Barfi’s love. Chopra manages this beautifully.

Barfi! looks like it was written after a marathon session of viewing the great silent films, both comedy and drama, after which Basu chain-linked the bits he liked and wove a sketchy story around them. (Sometimes, the inspirations are overtly showcased, like Ranbir Kapoor’s routine with a dummy that recalls Donald O’Connor’s Make ‘em laugh number from Singin’ in the Rain.) And in assembling these bits, Basu has constructed a remarkably faithful – one might even say pure – tribute to the silent era. The gags flow smoothly, organically – like the one where we think Barfi is painting a picture while it’s actually someone else, or the one where we see Barfi eyeing a sadhu’s paunch and think he’s reminded of his father when the reality is something different. Nothing is overdone, and nothing is enclosed in quotation marks. The film is somewhat overlong, and there were times I was a little bored and wished they’d get on with it – but the picture is one of a kind, and with no jarring shifts in tone, it’s also one of a piece.

And it’s all glued together by the score. The chases in Barfi! are fuelled by Mickey-Mousing music, reminiscent of the fast-and-furious silent shorts. (When Barfi runs from his pursuers, the score is appropriately antic, and when he finds himself on one end of a ladder balanced on a parapet wall and it begins to seesaw, the music transforms into a waltz.) When Barfi’s father staggers about his home while beset by that kidney ailment, a solo violin ratchets up the pathos. And when Barfi and others search for Jhilmil, the music turns conventionally dramatic, punctuated by his whistles. Basu tells his story through a combination of dialogues, voiceovers and music – but the music is enough. The score spills onto the screen literally when the predominant instruments – accordion, guitar, violin – are thrust into the hands of a trio that functions as… it’s hard to say. (A Greek chorus? A gimmick?) And in my favourite touch, that accordion functions as a wipe, ushering us to the next scene.

The few false notes are struck in the subplot that revolves around Ashish Vidyarthi, as Jhilmil’s father (whom we never actually see gambling). The story suddenly becomes some sort of whodunit, with revelations that are meant to make us gasp (Saurabh Shukla is delightful in these portions as a cop on Barfi’s tail; partly solemn, partly silly, he comes off as a combination of Javert and Wile E. Coyote) – these weak infusions of drama feel like something that Basu wove in halfheartedly after he showed the producers the film and they had a panic attack. And I wondered, at times, if the back-and-forth structure was really necessary. (The film keeps cutting between 1972 and 1978, between Calcutta and Darjeeling.) There are times the magic is organic – in the instance of the leaping shoe, or during a quiet horseback ride at night. But when fireflies are encased in soap bubbles or when a letter is written through film-song lyrics (zindagi ek safar hai suhana; jhilmil sitaron ka aangan hoga), we are yanked out of the whimsy. These touches are too forced, too literal.

But we overlook these lapses because of the level of achievement in the rest of the film, where Basu demonstrates a surefooted feel for whimsical tragicomedy that we never dreamt he possessed. (A ransom note cobbled together from alphabets cut out from newspapers ends with a salutary “Jai Hind!”) What we know he’s good at, despite the ill-fated Kites, is in detailing the darker desires of the heart – and he doesn’t disappoint there either. Barfi! is not just a feel-good story about the differently abled; it’s also a feel-bad story about the mistakes we make while trying to reconcile the head and the heart. As much as awards-talk is going to centre on Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra, it would be a mistake to overlook Ileana D’Cruz, who plays Shruti like a deer caught in life’s headlights. (The only small issue is that she looks so young; when forced to endure a frightful grey wig, she resembles a little girl playing a grandmother in a school play.)

If Barfi keeps returning to his father, Shruti’s crutch is her mother (Rupa Ganguly). She’s the kind of guileless girl who tells her mother that Ranjeet has been eyeing her in school, and the first thing her mother wants to know is: “Uske papa kya karte hain?” The young seek passion, but with age comes practicality. Shruti’s mother convinces her daughter to marry someone who’s right for her, and then watches helplessly as this man turns out all wrong (and this mother may still be in love with the man she convinced herself was wrong for her). And this dilemma crescendos to the exquisite torment of the scene where Shruti has to decide whether to leave with Barfi or leave him to Jhilmil. But as with the rest of the film, a melodramatic moment worthy of an aria is deflated with a wink and an injunction to smile. Leaving the bittersweet Barfi!, I was trying to think of another film that’s so sad that made me feel so happy watching it. I still haven’t come up with a name.

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Great review! The movie reminded me, both visually and ‘feel’ingly, of Amelie, I do wish he wouldn’t Rupa Ganguly’s big scene hadn’t been lifted quite so directly from The Notebook. I agree that PC had it much harder than RK, but for me she (or her scripted role) didn’t really manage to lift her character out of her disability, unlike Ranbir.

“where Basu demonstrates a surefooted feel for whimsical tragicomedy that we never dreamt he possessed”

Whoda thunk! What an absolute delight! And whatay tour-de-force by the Kapoor lad.

Felt parts of it were inspired by ‘Benny and Joon’, whose premise involves a similar romance between a silent Chaplin/Keatonesque Johnny Depp and a mentally challenged Mary Stuart Masterson… but Barfi manages to outdo itself in ways the other one couldnt.

I am trying to figure out, in all sincerity, the sadness in the film you talk about. Could you throw some light on it, please?
Also, Didnt it bother you, how the film delves into a ‘who-will-Barfi-end up-with’ direction, rather than capturing the complexity of the love triangle?

BR, extremely well-written…for me the 3 musicians were right out of Amelie… Saurabh Shukla’s rolling eyes whenever his boss calls him, priceless…and, the film worked like a delectable mix of Sadma, Sagara Sangamam and Swathimuthyam…with elements from each one of these woven in…

I really enjoyed the whimsical tone of the movie. It was very sweet…and like you said, Basu doesn’t dramatise the tragic events at all…it’s handled with a touch of whimsy (the scene describing Barfi’s mothers death) or with quiet dignity.

I was also very impressed with the way the character of Jhilmil was handled. We often resort to overt physical gestures, extravagant facial tics or other such exaggerated actions to depict someone with a disability. I was gearing up for an awkward, overt performance of that nature, but I thought Priyanka was Jhilmil was very measured.

Ileana looked absolutely lovely. Though I thought *exactly* the same thing about her old woman look – she looks like an earnest schoolgirl acting like a grandmother in a play. And though she’s been acting in movies for six years now, and done dozens of films, I didn’t think she had this in her.

After a point, I didn’t care too much for the silent comedy scenes – they became too much of “Look what Ranbir can do!”. Ranbir was fantastic, but these scenes felt to me too much like they were trying to showcase his talent. It didn’t help that some of the scenes felt like they were copied directly (the scene with the dummy was from Singin in the Rain, the scene with the ladder was from a Chaplin movie I can’t recall). Also, the last scene, where she climbs into the bed with Barfi…wasn’t that from The Notebook too?

I also don’t think that the back-and-forth was done very well. Especially when the whodunnit element creeps in – at a point I took myself mentally off from the screen for a few minutes to see if all the events (which were narrated in a back and forth manner) were logically consistent before focusing on the movie again.

But these are just minor cribs for what was a beautifully shot and very well-made movie that left me with a smile on my face.

BR – Remember that post you once wrote on “Hindi movies for those who don’t watch English movies”? Barfi probably falls into a more rarefied category – Hindi movies for those who don’t watch European cinema 🙂 Right from the day the first promo came out, every discussion on Barfi has almost unfailingly been annotated by its derivative nature, some acknowledged outright by the makers (Chaplin, Buster Keaton etc.) and some, not so much (Amelie, Jules e Jim, The Notebook, even Thiruda Thiruda as named by one blogger).

Having said that and having watched the movie yesterday, once I stopped playing “spot the influence” in my head, I enjoyed the movie so much! In fact the moments that stuck were so much more than just screenplay; the trains, the rains, that makeshift trolley running on the railway tracks, the hilariously misspelt ransom note, the jatra masks, the dewy paddy fields, the accordion riffs…even sundry combs and umbrellas getting their time to shine in the hands of this lovingly mounted production. Basu and team deserve an A in atmospherics alone. That the lead actors were amazing and we actually end up rooting for Jhilmil, Shruti and Barfi is the real surprise, given as you’ve mentioned, the many, many opportunities for excess that were mercifully reined in. At my New Jersey theater, the audience broke into spontaneous applause when the movie ended…can’t remember the last time that happened!

Whoever dubbed for Ashish Vidhyarthi made him sound just like he did prior to his adoption of the stentorian voice he developed as a ‘Madaraasi’ cop. I hope we havent lost him. The Telugu film industry has to take steps to protect poaching lest we lose Sayaji Shinde as well 🙂

Felt the same about a few scenes being too slow as if Anurag wanted to give us time to ruminate and register the sadness. Ranbir’s antics reminded me of Marcel Marceau and what did you think about the windows and skylights? Many a time we were looking at them through one or they were looking at each other.

I have a feeling that whenever an Indian film incorporates a character who is physically or mentally disabled, we are so overwhelmed that we tend to overlook the flaws in the movie. This is true of barfi where we tolerate Ranbir Kapoor’s silly slapstick only because his character is deaf and dumb. When actors like Salman Khan too do the same, we point our fingers and accuse him of insulting us – the “intelligent” audience. This is true of movies like Vikram’s Kasi (where the male and female leads are physically disabled), Bala’s Nan Kadavul (where Pooja is blind) and to an extent Sridevi’s character in Moondram Pirai. The former two are undoubtedly boring but I don’t see critics like you pointing out the flaws. Instead you choose to talk about the “delicate subject” and how it was “beautifully handled”

So my question to you is, why do you let sympathy cloud your judgement? After all you did call a lot of commercially successfully movies silly even when a lot of others didn’t 🙂

B.H.Harsh: I did point out all the potentially sad bits in the review. And no, it didn’t bother me that the film went in that direction, because this *was* a film about love.

Govardhan Giridass: I don’t know when these guys will realise that, at least when it comes to mainstream cinema, there’s not all that great a difference between “North Indian” and “South Indian” audiences. If a “Vikramarkudu” became a hit there, then a “3 Idiots” worked here too. Of course, there are certain culturally mandated fundas, but…

ram: “sundarapandian” wasn’t bad. Very crudely made, but the drama kept me engaged. Thankfully there was only one major “natpu” dialogue. I thought the scenes with the heroine and her father/family were done very well. But the hero wasn’t good at all, with all those “stud” mannerisms from the Sudhakar days. And a “hero introduction song”? Et tu Sasikumar? 🙂

Ramya: “I was also very impressed with the way the character of Jhilmil was handled” — yeah, I really liked her performance. Just the right amount of “otherness” in it.

And I’m glad you admitted to this: “I took myself mentally off from the screen for a few minutes…” That happens sometimes, no? 🙂

Sandhya: I think the “derivativeness” of “Barfi!” is different from the “derivativeness” we saw in “Life in a… Metro,” where an entire subplot was derived from “The Apartment.” If someone sat down with the old silents, they’d no doubt spot a lot of the staging from there, but what Basu has done, as I said in my review, is “chain-linked the bits he liked and wove a sketchy story around them.” That’s a different thing, IMO. What are the “Jules et Jim” and “Thiruda Thiruda” bits, BTW?

peccavi: Don’t recall much of “Life is Beautiful,” but that was more a smile-through-tears kinda movie, wasn’t it? That’s not the case here, where there’s not much nudging for tears, in the first place.

nandyreflects: I don’t get your comment at all, because you assume so many things:

(1) “we are so overwhelmed that we tend to overlook the flaws in the movie” — first of all, this is not an “overwhelming” kind of movie, plus there are flaws a lot of people have pointed out.

(2) “we tolerate Ranbir Kapoor’s silly slapstick only because his character is deaf and dumb” — no, the slapstick is not silly (and if so, then Chaplin and Keaton are “silly” too), and at least I “tolerated” Ranbir’s silliness in “Ajab Prem…” too.

(3) “When actors like Salman Khan too do the same, we point our fingers and accuse him of insulting us” — er, no! I think a lot of us liked “Dabangg,” for instance. But that said, Salman’s brand of silliness is worlds removed from what’s here.

(4) “[Kasi and Naan Kadavul] are undoubtedly boring — er, no! Especially not the latter. And if I write anything with the phrase “delicate subject,” please chop off my hands at once [though of course now that I’ve said it, my subconscious will seize this phrase and make me use this right next week] 🙂

(5) “why do you let sympathy cloud your judgement?” — this is probably the biggest assumption of all. How could you possibly know that my response to the film is only because of the handicapped nature of the leads?

Great review as always B. Like pretty much all Hindi movies my exposure to it will come 6~8 months down the road once a DVD copy with good English subtitles comes out. But one comment I can make straight off is for the soundtrack: Pritam’s music is exquisite, a cool breeze wafting over you on a humid day. This one’s on repeat play in my iPOD!

It was disappointing to see negative reviews on Barfi!, those where people pointed out only the negative aspects of the director and compared this with his other works. After I watched it, I went for the movie once again the very next day. I realized only some time back why I did so. I wanted to experience ‘that life’ once again. The movie was taken/shot so beautifully that it got merged with my mental environment. Now I’m glad to have read this and for that you liked it the way you did.

Errr… I am not sure if I’m trying to find too much of inspiration/homage, but does anybody else think, that Barfi-Jhilmil’s domestic scenes pays a little tribute to the Soumitra-Sharmila’s scenes in Apur Sansar. Wife seating with the hand-fan (is that the right word?), the bare-bone room on terrace with a view of Kolkata?

The same thing happens every single time. I watch a hindi movie that I like. I think about it the next day as I liked it and read the reviews and am totally shocked by most of them. Then I read Baradwaj’s review and order is restored. The only place where you can read an unbiased review that tells how it is. Positives are highlighted and negatives are talked about. Your reviews are very smartly written.

And I am proud that my short review that I posted today asking my friends to watch it is mostly in sync with yours:

“There is a difference between enjoying a movie and liking a movie. I enjoyed the Batman trilogy but I liked Barfi.

A simple story told well and some very nice performances. A bit slow at times but the director has his moments, a few of those spaced across the movie, to make it likeable. At times, it feels like you are reading a well written short story. It is a statement that says that the art of movie making is very much alive in India and you do not need an item number. The movie could have been better in a few places, like make-up, but overall glad that I watched it. Finally someone can legitimately say “thoda hatke hain””

Like someone above said, I didn’t know Ileana could pull this off and was bracing myself for a Nargis Fakhri-ish debacle. But she wonderfully underplayed Shruti.
Priyanka, I thought did a good amount of justice to her role – hand gestures, minimal dialogue – almost perfect. I couldn’t help but compare to Vikram’s over-the-top stuff in DTM.

And, no mention of the lamp post routine? What a quirky game! Loved that one.

I initially questioned the necessity to show Barfi and Jhilmil to be married(as in – their love was unworldly and transcendental)but convinced myself later that this movie was about the normal life of special people) but was thankful in the end that they didn’t show them having kids and raising them in their own ‘cute’ way(could have been a melodrama minefield)

To nitpick, why do life accounts have to be always recounted at someone’s death bed(Hey Ram is another that I can think of)? Aren’t there other stages of life that directors can come up with?

I think this is going to be one of those movies with which I share this love-hate relationship of sorts. TBH, I am not a big fan of slapstick, but Barfi did have its funny moments. The performances were no doubt, stellar. The climax is the only thing which stops me from saying this is a good movie. I just find the concept of marrying off an autistic child to this random dude very twisted. Because in my mind, the girl needs all the love and care–the sort you would give a 5 year old. Basically, not a good movie if you just want to scream out “Stop exploiting the poor girl!” when you’re in the midst of a huge audience that’s on the verge of tears.

Twisted probably because you are giving some sexual connotations to it. If you think of it as the commitment Barfi makes to take care of her (and she reciprocates) then it is a brilliant gesture to tell the society and give her the respect she deserves. And autism is not as straight forward as a mind of a 5 year old.

BR To your point that “I think the “derivativeness” of “Barfi!” is different from the “derivativeness” we saw in “Life in a… Metro,” where an entire subplot was derived from “The Apartment.” – er…turns out the derivativeness is not THAT different in this case either. Stumbled upon this blow-by-blow account of Barfi “inspirations” via Twitter. Particularly annoying is the blatant theft of musical passages; for Pritam, old habits die hard I guess.

I envy my parents in this regard …they will watch Barfi this week unaware and unaffected by all this plagiarism talk and enjoy themselves all the more for it. They allow their cinema diet to be curated by the pace and whims of Bollywood, unlike some of us impatient folks:-)

Anyway, this ‘betrayal’ doesn’t take away from Barfi for me though…Amelie didn’t have Ranbir Kapoor after all. And The Notebook was just plain awful, so there!

An extremely well-made movie. But the relationship between Barfi and Jhilmil, for me, was not something you could really define and that was what was so beautiful about it. Basu should have left it at that. That wedding really boxed it into something much more mundane.

Sandhya: Like I pointed out in my review, “Barfi! looks like it was written after a marathon session of viewing the great silent films, both comedy and drama, after which Basu chain-linked the bits he liked and wove a sketchy story around them. (Sometimes, the inspirations are overtly showcased, like Ranbir Kapoor’s routine with a dummy that recalls Donald O’Connor’s Make ‘em laugh number from Singin’ in the Rain.)”

There’s no doubt (or major revelation) about the fact that bits have been “borrowed” from silent films. About “Koshish,” I guess a plot that’s similar *will* have certain similar elements, like if you feature a blind girl, you most likely will have a scene of her not being able to see something that’s visible to the audience.

To me, a “Namak Haram” (or, in Anurag Basu’s case, “Murder”) is more problematic in this regard because those films are almost entirely reworkings of a whole plot. Unlike something like “Barfi!”, which appropriates things and refashions them in the service of a new plot.

Is the last scene from “Michael Madana Kamarajan” inspired by “Gold Rush”? Yes. But is “Michael Madana Kamarajan” inspired by “Gold Rush”? NO!

There’s a difference. It’s like the link that Vashisht Das points out above. I can definitely see the similarity, but there’s not enough to claim that it’s either a “tribute” to Mani Ratnam or a “ripoff” from “Thiruda Thiruda.” Or what Avik Pramanik says about “Apur Sansar.”

I’ve discussed this in these posts here:

In this post, I talk about a very interesting quote in this regard by Krzysztof Kieślowski. There’s also one by Tarantino.

In this post, I talk about how “ot all inspirations are alike and plagiarism (very, very different from inspiration) needs to be punished, but we may enjoy our movies more if we focus on achievement instead of antecedent. If that’s good enough for Godard, maybe it ought to be good enough for the rest of us”

And regarding the music, if riffs are enough to posit a claim of “plagiarism,” then no composer is completely original. Speaking of music, here’s how Bob Dylan responds to charges of plagiarism against him: “quotation is a rich and enriching tradition.” The article is here.

Question for BR. Shri Hariharan spake thus in his rejoinder: “In this negotiation, Nolan is like most young Americans, sufficiently right of centre, male-dominated and seeped in the American’s conviction to exercise his right to bear arms and in this case with a lot more demonic gadgets to eliminate wrong-doers.”

So, BRji, Christopher Nolan is British. Does Hariharan mean that he is putting himself in the shoes of young Americans, or is he just misinformed, as befits someone who teaches film to unsuspecting young minds?

BR – Sorry but I can’t be as charitable to the copycats are you are. In fact, I have the opposite approach as far as the pastiche cut-and-paste hatchet job is concerned. If it is a Zinda/Ghajini/Kaante/Murder then I KNOW that the concept as a whole has been lifted and adjust my framework of expectations accordingly. In fact, in the hands of the right director, a holistic adaptation, however obvious, can be quite wonderful…case in point – Kukunoor’s Teen Deewarein. But the Barfi patchwork quilt of “inspirations” seems more devious and frankly stupid since every source is a click away daring you to be found.

If Basu liked the visual of the rat in the round cage from Kusturica’s film (see my previous post, the link is in the comments), then why didn’t he at least bother to change the shape of the cage? A true creative would have taken that inspiring visual and done something even more inspiring with it. I get that all of us internalize our obsessions, but didn’t you yourself in a very recent post justify your expectation of professionalism from a filmmaker? And what can be more professional and more correct than intellectual honesty? In this Internet age, there are only two currencies of value, IMHO…privacy and originality. Lazy fim-making can’t be brushed away with there-are-no-original-stories-even-Dylan-and-Tarantino-say-so kind of rationalizations. And as someone pointed out here in one of those discussions you linked too, this sort of theft would be unthinkable, even illegal, in academia or publishing or any other kind of art.

I saw Shah Rukh Khan say in a recent interview that the minute we stop saying that something is “good enough for a Hindi film”, our films will be much better. Funny because SRK himself is guilty of ‘good enough for a Hindi film” acting, but I agree with him on this one.

To sign off on a positive note, although I am a big fan of the auteur concept, maybe it would do our filmmakers good to get more collaborative in the scripting stages…at least then the writers could call each other out on their sticky finger tendencies. One example – my absolute favorite viewing experience by far this year is the American TV show Breaking Bad. With just a handful of terrific actors, a few recurring locations and a modest budget, the seven-member writing team headed by Vince Gilligan has created an unforgettable show. An original show.

Just Back from Barfi and must say I loved it. There were times after the first twenty minutes or so when I was feeling a little listless saying to myself Gangs of Wasseypur was so much more fun , but the film pulled itself up quickly enough and delivered a charming fairy tale that warms the cockles of your heart and moistens your eyes. I don’t know who but he said, “ film sare meant to take you on an emotional expedition’ and this one surely takes you to places you haven’t been in Hindi film recently.
Just like in Gangs of Wasseypur, what I loved most was the stylistic adventure. Whoever thought one could use “ Teri Meherbaniya’ during a funeral procession nad make it sound perfectly natural, is what I wondered while watching GOW. Here I was wondering, who in today’s time would think of using ful-blown slapstick gags in a heart-touching love story involving two differently able protagonists? But Anurag does and he manages to pull it off magnificently.

As I had mentioned sometime back, Indian films are so bad in physical comedy in general because we do not have that tradition, unlike the Chinese. That is why I was so impressed with Ranbir’s act in Ajab Prem Ki Gajab Khnai and many sequences of ‘ Eega’. Now this one goes a step further as it manages to integrate the slapstick into a serious telling quite seamlessly.

And some of the gags are truly inventive. Take the the scene where he races ahead of the police man on the track on tht raileay sled. When he starts using the rod as an oar the gag goes to another level. I also like the way Ranbir plays these gags without appearing like a clown or buffoon unlike how Kamal Hassan does in his films. Nothing wrong with the way Kamal plays his roles,. But this is a welcome change. And it has Ranbir’s own stamp. And there isn’t another actor on the horizon who can match him in physical comedy of this kind.
For the record, I did not feel the weight of what it had borrowed from where at all. I mean one can say Tom and Jerry borrows from Silent films or that Mr Bean borrows from Charlie Chaplin. Actually the onle scene that reminded ME of a sequence from another film was the sequence of Barfi throwing his shoe up in the air to announce his presence to Jhilmil. It is quite possibly inspired from Adoor Goplakrishnan’s Mathulikal where the woman prisoner chucks rose twig in the air to announce her presence to the Mammoty character on the other side of the wall. What a wonderful appropriation of the idea and usage in the film!
In fact if all the sources from which the film has borrowed as some have pointed out are true ( I am not that prolific a film viewer), the achievement of Anurag is even more commendable. Because the film looks remarkably seamless and one of a piece without any disjointedness or awkward feel. It also does not remind one of any particular film. It is like a collage. Only that Anurag has lifted a collage to the level of a master artwork .

Two things work so well apart from the performance by Ranbir. One is the performance by Priyanak. If Ranbir’s performance gives the film its body, Priyanka’s gives it its soul. Together they manage to present an ideal of love that is easy to buy into. The scene where Ileana is rummaging through Jhilmil’s belongings, mostly knickknacks, and Ranbir snatches them away from her protectively, making Ileana that Barfi now loves only Jhllmil, embodies that so palpably. The other is the pacing and jumps between timelines.
I think without the deliberate slow pacing at times the ruminations on love that the director wants you to have won’t be possible. And the same goes for the back and forthing of the timeline. In Brectian terms it could be acled a device of alienation. Without it we would just be hurtling along to the finish of the story. And to me a film is selling itself short if it is just a story. In its present format it expands itself to something atht lingers on , something that stays with you.

And yes, I loved the songs and the lyrics. Someone like Bhansali who claims to make operatic films should learn how to get good, meaningful songs written and how to use them in films. ( take a bow Swnand Kirkire, Neelesh Mishra and Syed Qadri) ) . The pick of the lot after seeing the film is ‘ Itni si Khushi” which has a distinct Sali Chaudhury flavour.

And the final shot with the musicians under the tree…Anurag and Pritam got it right this time after the contrived attempt in Life In A Metro.

Oh sorry, one last thing. It was a masterly touch.. that dance sequence with its masks and coloured lights ( Is it Seraikella Chhau?). It really gives the film a final high and a splendid transcendence.

Sandhya: That’s a bit confusing. How do you pardon something like a Zinda/Kaante (I think Ghajini still is better off taking the idea and reworking it into something else) but not something like Barfi. Because it makes me wonder who is charitable here. I remember Raja Sen wrote a wonderful open letter to Sanjay Gupta during the Zinda time explaining what Tarantino does with his copying/inspiration. Also when we are dealing with these cases, it’s more rewarding to look at the whole product than sum of its parts. That is why, just changing the shape of the cage to pretend to be original comes across as clumsy. I don’t think that would have made any difference. People would still pounce on Basu for the slightest of so-called-plagiarism charges. This doesn’t mean Basu suddenly becomes a Tarantino level auteur but not recognizing what has come out of it is a bit unfair I think. Academia is not the right analogy here I feel. Academia, more often than not, is going to deal with hard data. Art or at least cinema always deals with interpretations. You probably mean using results of other works and adding them in the References page but I am not sure if cinema works that way. Does that mean Tarantino should have mentioned Hey Ram in a bibliography at the end of the film? Sometimes we exaggeration using recurring tropes and genres. Which is why I feel we go overboard with trying to find the source. Apparently the plot here resembles Gone Baby Gone. That really seems like a stretch to me. We pounced on Kahaani too in a very similar fashion.

Well, long story short, I don’t think “if it’s good enough for Godard/Tarantino” to be lazy rationalization at all. The set of videos here wonderfully channels this philosophy. I think I’ve shared this here before

Movie was too pretty. Even the `challenged’ characters were pretty and that’s why Ranbir’s character was hard to connect with. And hard to believe that an affluent, non-challenged woman like Shruti would ever fall in love with a poor, challenged Barfi in the real world….The non-linear format was confusing and pointless, and was there to paper over a thin story-line i guess….

Gradwolf – I really don’t pardon any appropriation, my usual reaction is more of a resigned “I should have known better”. Just because I really admire R.D Burman doesn’t mean I condone some of his note-for-note-copy work. There is always a way to showcase your inspirations and still be classy about it… Anurag Kashyap expressed his gratitude to the Madurai triumverate at the beginning of Gangs of Wasseypur for giving him the nudge to go back to his roots. Imagine that…not for a story or a setting but just for an idea! Did he need to? No. Could Bala or Ameer or Sasikumar care less? No. But he did and the world (at least my world) is a better place for it. If you are going to take open dibs in your film, your wonderful, beautiful film, out of every film-maker from Sarajevo to San Francisco,then at least acknowledge that, is all I’m saying.

While it might have earned some goodwill if Anurag had put in a line , ‘ I have been inspired by a hundred different films, from those of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to those of Gulzar and Balu Mahendra.’, I think it would be pointless. It certainly has no bearing on how you respond to the film. Anurag Kashypa has acknowledged his debt to the Madurai filmmakers. But my experience of Gangs of Wasseypur won’t have been any different had he not done so.

Sandhya: Wanted to write about “Breaking Bad” earlier, but forgot. I’m not quite buying this season (I’ve watched six episodes), with Walt’s descent into utter immorality. He began cooking meth because he wanted to provide for his family, and he’d hit a wall with an expiry date. That’s perfectly understandable.

But what he did with that kid Brock was odd. I’m not saying it’s unforgivable or any such thing. I just wanted a stronger reason for him to think: “Okay, I’m doing this for myself. I need Gus eliminated. I guess it’s fine if a kid becomes collateral damage.” And no, that dinner-table scene with Walt and his wife and Jesse, where Walt tells Jesse that this business is all he’s got left was just not enough. I hope the remaining episodes address this aspect of his descent into not just badness but…. evil.

And that final shot of the last season, with the label still dangling off the Lily of the Valley plant was just tacky. It was practically holding up a neon sign to the audience. Didn’t expect that from a show that’s usually so subtle.

I am another one of those ‘Breaking Bad’ fans. I have just finished watching Season 4, and though it maintains its consistently great quality almost throughout the season , the last 2-3 episodes of it left me less than enthused. It felt as if the makers were in a hurry to wrap up the season so they crammed a lot of narrative in a very short time. Didn’t expect that from a show with such a slow burn feel.

Disagree with you on that Lily. I, for one, needed that neon sign and I am not a casual viewer of the show. It was not clear how such a thing happened to the kid (may be he took it accidently which would have been a fine plot point). The explanation was needed only if to let the viewer know how far Walt has gone down a dangerous road. Till that point, you are still rooting for Walt but after that closing shot, I as a viewer felt that something crumbled inside me.

Hmm, I am just a film novice, similar to Adso in the Name of the rose.
So what I can add is that the plot reminded me of how I didnt hang on to love when it showed up thrice so far in my life.
“I’m crazy about you”, still resonates in my mind, and by the time I realized & wanted to reciprocate, it was too late.
Bittersweet memories and a lifetime of regrets, but that’s reality? 😐
I know exactly what Shruti went through…

BR – Agree with your assessment of the Lily of the Valley sub-plot…it was contrived, hasty and riddled with implausibilities in a show that is none of those things! And your confusion on Walter White’s supposed volte face is totally what the makers are aiming for, from what I have been reading. There was an excellent NYT interview where Vince Gilligan mentioned how most TV shows have the protagonist in some kind of life-long stasis with no visible changes…and that’s how he got the idea to create a show that at it’s very basic, chronicles the process of change; (from Mr. Chips to Scarface, as Gilligan has repeatedly said). The fallout of this is that the audience is made to get more and more uncomfortable with the idea of rooting for WW, who earned their sympathy with all his trials and tribulations early on.

In fact I thought that Walter’s natural mean streak was exposed several times, right from the first episode, way before Brock and Gus and anyone else had to suffer the effects of his madness. In terms of chemistry metaphors, WW is a classic example of an irreversible reaction, just as the show’s ongoing emphasis on karmic checks and balances totally mirrors the two sides of a chemical reaction and how they MUST be balanced for the universe to operate seamlessly. The problem with WW is exactly the one thing that makes him so good at what he does – his uber-clinical thinking and logical justifications; perfect for the lab and the scientific journal, not so great in real life.

Season 5A that just concluded here clearly signals the inevitable retribution; I don’t want to spoil it for you but just keep the faith and you will be rewarded with a lot more Heisenberg bad-assery and some ultimate paisa-vasool set pieces. And if you haven’t done so, I would recommend following the BB TV Clubs of Grantland, Vulture and also writer Alan Sepinwall for their insights. Helps me get so many more of the nuggets that the writers hide like Easter Eggs in each episode. I’m all the more informed on plot mechanics like MacGuffins, cold opens and Chekov’s Guns thanks to BB fan geekdom. But that’s just natural for a show where even the junk yard mechanic talks string theory and god particles…yeah, science 🙂

Sandhya – I am new to the discussion and to “Breaking Bad” as well, but it sounds very interesting. But, based on all the statements that I’ve seen about it, in this particular discussion thread, it looks as if the series demands a fairly advanced knowledge of HEP. Am I correct in making this assumption?

“Leaving the bittersweet Barfi!, I was trying to think of another film that’s so sad that made me feel so happy watching it. I still haven’t come up with a name.”

That’s a lovely note to conclude the review on. The last movie that I’ve seen that satisfies this criteria was about a week ago, Ozu’s “Early Summer”. Granted that one doesn’t exactly brim over with joy, but there’s the typical quiet, intense happiness (in conjunction with sadness) that seeps through at the end of virtually all the films of Ozu’s late period.

I think a sense of proportion is called for here. Let is start with agreeing that all art borrows from what has been done before. The question obviously is how much new has the borrower added to what he or she has borrowed. It is a bit subjective, but then all important questions in life truth, beauty, honesty are all subjective. The fact is Barfi has managed to do something unique. It has borrowed from a number of films, the number perhaps being larger than one has seen in any other film. And yet it has endeared itself to most viewers and charmed them completely. It hasn’t aroused the kind of negative reaction that most copied film do. It has rating of 9.1 on IMDB, the highest ever for an Indian film, with over 8000 votes giving their rating. None of the reviewers , Indian or foreign, even when panning the film have made a big issue of the borrowing. The film obviously has done something right. I would like to explain it thus: What Anurag has done is a kind of collage, except it is a kind of high-art collage where the individual pieces pasted have their appeal, but there are original portions too and the creation as a whole has managed to turn into a piece of art with an impact of its own. How gooda piece can be debated, but that is not what we are discussing here.

Now comes the more interesting question. As Sarthak has pointed out he could have created as good a piece without the borrowings. Let’s say he could. But what harm has he done by the borrowing? Maybe he hasn’t got all the praise he could have got as an original auteur. But have we the viewers lost anything? Have Chaplin and Keaton lost anything?
MY answer is no. It is my contention that many of the younger viewers of Bollywood cinema may not even have seen a film of Chaplin or Keaton. Maybe this will make them download one or two, or look them in the DVD library. Let’s say they don’t do that. Even so, they at least have had a chance to look at some aspect of the art of Chaplain and Keaton through Barfi. Ina sense the art of Chaplin and Keaton lives on through this recreation. It is similar to transmission of traits through genetic copying and transmutation.

Actually, this whole obsession with authorship is very western. We know Michael angelo designed the Sistine Chapel. But who designed the Konark Temple or the Taj Mahal? Rodin made the Thinker but who did the Natraja? We appreciate the art of Konark or the Chola Nataraja without worrying about the authorship. Even a work like Mahabharta is notionally written by Vyasa, and Kabir’s dohas by Kabir, since there has been so much parallel contributions from anonymous sources augmenting the original.

The thing to do with Barfi is perhaps to look at the creation without worrying about the author. How does it stack up then? That is the question worth worrying about

.As about our assessment of Anurag,perhaps if he had made this film without any borrowing he would have been a genius, which based on this film, he obviously is not. But as I said earlier, he has manged to do something commendable here. And we must give him credit for that.

It’s a generally held view(and probably true) that creators in addition to observing filmmakers, derive inspiration from real life experiences as well. Now, this could be an encounter with a stranger that they meet during a travel or life incidents of the next door neighbor. So, the acknowledgement then needs to be made by the creator to “all people who have inspired me” – which is sort of the foundation of most creations anyway and is redundant, according to me.

The other point here it seems(my interpretation) is that the expression of gratitude needs to be made only when a sizeable populace has had access to the original because otherwise they would feel cheated. Who can then speak for the next door neighbor whose story was probably used for the creation? Should there be a note thanking the next door neighbor in the credits? And, where do you draw the line here?

I agree with Gradwolf that sometimes we go overboard trying to find the source. While I am for originality, it seems to me that with the easy access to sources via internet, the whole exercise of spot-the-plagiarism on anything and everything is a tool to tell the world – “look how I am able to spot these copycats!”

Eventually, if I do come to know that a film maker or a music composer has copied, I don’t really care about that info nor can that take away the enjoyment(if any) from their creations. It’s just a meta-info on the piece, more than anything else.

dear brangan
Our immediate thought is that he’s going to jump – or at least threaten to do so, like Dharmendra in Sholay – but what follows is a warm illustration of his determination to look at the bright side.

the peeing in fields and then workers looking + the time reversal in a clock was taken from a korean movie lover’s concerto

“Actually, this whole obsession with authorship is very western. We know Michael angelo designed the Sistine Chapel. But who designed the Konark Temple or the Taj Mahal? Rodin made the Thinker but who did the Natraja? We appreciate the art of Konark or the Chola Nataraja without worrying about the authorship. Even a work like Mahabharta is notionally written by Vyasa, and Kabir’s dohas by Kabir, since there has been so much parallel contributions from anonymous sources augmenting the original.”

– Well said! Take a bow Utkal! Convinces me that this is one of the few blogs where the comments are sometimes just as enjoyable as the original article.

this is my response to a rather syrupy discussion about the movie on the counsellors forum of india,

Barfi: loved the movie but basu faltered just at the end.

loved the movie because beautifully done (as shubhra gupta says giant strides), loved the music (background music-reminded me of Hugo), and also have been totally in love with RK since sometime/ But i feel Anuraag basu who made such a beautiful movie fell into the proverbial trap of making out the characters into bhagwan (marrying them off). I think it was in Kabhie Kabhi that Shashi K said insaan banna is difficult, bagwan to chodo.

being human is so noble, what RK did was so noble. how many of us have the magnanimity of spirit and courage to look after an child with a disability. its tough. looks romantic on screen, but believe me, I have been in the field for more than 2 1/2 decades and its no easy task. and mine is the teacher’s perspective (mine was a 9-5 interaction 5 days a week and i was paid for it), ask a family member.

Why, could it be just not filial love instead of romantic love. PC has a dev disorder and is incapable fo relating to another person. what is shown in the film, Jhilmil is unable to understand the nuances of relationship romantic or otherwise. I think RK and ileana share a beautiful relationship and could have looked after her together.

So instead of a win-win situation of all three people being happy together, we have two people “sacrificing” to make someone who does not even know the difference “happy”. I would have been happy if Basu had done that, got the 3 of them to work out a relationship.

unfortunately, he took the easy way out!!!

P.S: my comment is not related because I have been in Special Ed. i think we do this in all aspects of life. “stupid” sacrifices always prevail and are eulogised (check out our movies, recently a marathi movie Kaaksparsh did the same)

My interpretation about PC-RK (Jhilmil-Barfi) relationship is a little different from yours. I don’t think Jhilmil wanted Barfi as a care-taker/father-figure/friend as their relationship progress. I have never worked with specially abled people, so maybe I might have read the mannerisms wrong, but to me it seemed like Jhilmil wanted Barfi all for herself. At some level, she sensed Shruti’s feelings towards Barfi, and wanted to be a little like her – the ‘saree scene’, and later when they both come to look for her, she displays her possessiveness, and again, Barfi was someone with whom she got physically that close to rub noses with. To Jhilmil, as again shown in the last scene, being with Barfi was for life – live together, die together. And though personally we all have different interpretations of love as it is meant to be – pure without any sexual overtones, or strong and passionate, or long time companionship, whatever, to Jhilmil, this was love.
And Barfi understood and reciprocated it – he smiles when he feels Jhilmil in bed with him at the end. Barfi wanted to be with Jhilmil – he was desperate to get her back. It probably all fell in place for him when he does his usual ‘would you stay with me till death’ experiment with Jhilmil, but I am sure he knew that he could never leave her even before that.
Yes, this could all be interpreted as ‘he wanted to take care of her, and she wanted him to take care of her, so why can’t Shruti and Barfi do it together?’. But in Jhilmil and Barfi’s universe, it did not seem like there was place for anyone else.

“Eventually, if I do come to know that a film maker or a music composer has copied, I don’t really care about that info nor can that take away the enjoyment(if any) from their creations.”

enjoying the creation without knowing(or caring for) the actual source is one thing. Commending the concerned artist for his “originality” or “creativity” when you didn’t know that he had flicked it is another matter altogether. The latter is what a critic/reviewer has to be wary of lest he looks like a fool when somebody points out the actual source later on.Its not just a “meta-info” for them, or for even a discerning fan for that matter

Apu: That comment was simply lovely. Thanks. That’s how I saw it too. From the beginning, there is a fable-like air about the film, and therefore I never looked at it through a “realism” (i.e. is this feasible/possible?) lens.

vijay: I think this is a good topic for a column. I part ways on you a bit about “The latter is what a critic/reviewer has to be wary of lest he looks like a fool when somebody points out the actual source later on.”

I think that a critic/reviewer has to be guided by the basic feeling with which he walks out of the theatre. And if that feeling is joyous, then that needs to be conveyed without getting defensive about the fact that someone in the future may point out inspirations etc. Because as I said earlier, there are two aspects at work here: (1) your response to the film itself, and (2) the general estimation of the film’s originality. If you become too “wary” about (2), then you’re not doing your job.

As for the “looking like a fool” bit, well, that’s going to keep happening every now and then when you practice a profession in the public eye, so you can’t get too caught up in that. If and when that happens, you just pick yourself up, dust off the seat of your pants, and soldier on to the next bit of writing 🙂

I saw this comment on Jabberwock’s review from one of the readers there. But this one was too good to simply let lie. So, this is not my observation, and here goes:

Barfi!:
A movie about a deaf and mute man whose life of fun and adventure soon starts revolving around a mentally challenged woman, and keeps getting disrupted by a Bengali woman. Pure brilliance ! Can’t wait for another film based on Congress party!

“The latter is what a critic/reviewer has to be wary of lest he looks like a fool when somebody points out the actual source later on..”
I think Rangan has already answered most of what I wanted to say below. But I differ on his “(2)the general estimation of the film’s originality”. I feel “estimation” on this sort of stuff is simply tangential to what the critic/analyst needs to point out in a movie because at the time of writing a review(assuming it’s done within a week of a movie premiere) you might not be sure of which pieces are original or derived or otherwise. Why even bother to comment on that aspect then? Logically, it makes a case to put in words only on what was enjoyable or not based on what they saw. Given most of reviews we read these days are in blogs which allow for comment space, this according to me should be the place where these sort of discussions and interpretations related to derivations/plagiarism should happen, and not in the review.
On the other hand if they encounter the influential elements during movie watching, it most certainly would affect their experience which probably will reflect in their review as well which then would be acceptable, IMO.

Brangan, so what is your opinion on the movie now that you have realized you were duped by basu into appreciating scenes which were lifted frame by frame from other movies . How does one explain plagiarizing from a korean movie from the early 2000’s for a film supposedly inspired by the silents. Rather than leaving a bittersweet feeling , the movie left me cold and bored ( this ,even before I knew the extent of plagiarism). It felt fake and forced and foreign and I felt that Ranbir was trying too hard. Priyanka seemed to confuse autism with retardation and shruti was a half baked character. I like that reviewers are sticking with their own glowing reviews of the film even after being made to look like fools. Is is too hard to admit you fell for an act of highway robbery instead of trying to justify it quoting Tarantino and kiezlowski?

MVickers: What can I say, I liked the film! 🙂 The fact that it’s “stolen” (or whatever word word you want to use) cannot change that. How can you retroactively go back and change the way you emotionally reacted to something?

Dear Brangan, Its like this, I love a piece of poetry, I think the poet is brilliant. Then I find out that the poet has basically stolen the words exactly from Shakespeare. OK, I was clueless enough to not know who Shakespeare was when I first read the poem. But ,AFTER I find out it was copied word to word, I would still love the poem but be severely annoyed at the blatant lack of originality of the guy who was trying to pass it off as his own. It takes nothing away from the work of art but it definitely exposes the plagiarizer. Its the same case with Barfi, you liked blatantly copied scenes ( down to the exact framing), so it’s a tribute to the original artists who dreamt up the scenes in the first place, not someone who has done a great copy paste job and who cannot be considered an artist in the first place. I have no problems with inspirations, I have a problem with frame to frame copies of iconic or in this case obscure scenes .
So to answer your question, you cannot unlike the film, you can just acknowledge that you liked the work of an unoriginal director who put together shots from other movies.But its all OK in the end since what you reacted to emotionally was the brainchild of other more creative people usurped by a hack in the service of his film.

Did Barfi lift scenes from other movies? Yes.
Does that mean that Barfi can be described as a collage of lifted scenes? No.

What touched me was the way the story unfolds, about worlds of people I know almost nothing about (An Autistic girl and a deaf and dumb boy) and of other people and their reactions which were natural and expected. The point here is, is the movie being considered great because of these scenes or is it because of the whole product? And to me it is the latter.
MVickers, in your example of the poet and Shakespeare – if the lines are exactly lifted from an entire dialogue of Shakespeare’s drama, then yes, the poet has no claim to be called talented. But, if the poet takes words (not sentences) that make up even half the poem, then he/she is still talented. Hell, if he/she takes some phrases and puts them in his poem but manages to convey something that touches, and wows you…he/she is still talented.
And given that the movie did not work for you anyway, and that can surely happen, it is then that you will try pointing out scenes, and accusing the director of plagiarism.
For those who enjoyed the movie, for whatever reasons, they can generally be ambivalent about ‘copied’ scenes, which seem to make up for half an hour of a 2 hour movie (all timings are approximate). Because, copied scenes or not, it is still a good story and told well, and acted well by everyone.

I think people are being too harsh on Barfi on account of the supposed plagairism. Sure, there are some scenes which are quite similar to those in other movies, and this probably reduces my assessment of the brilliance of the director a little bit but I still think that the final product is still a beautiful work of art. Barfi is not an exact copy of another movie. Yes, bits and pieces have been borrowed from many other places but it does stand together as an original, coherent, and beautiful whole. To take the poetry example, what if the poem in question is such that a passage is borrowed from Shakespeare, one passage from Keats, one from Shelley, and a few passages the poet created himself so that the final poem still stands on its own as beautiful poetry. It is no mean feat to create a poem by collaging passages from so many stylistically different poets. A poem which despite its liberal borrowings from disparate sources still stirs very different and deep emotions within you. Do I think that the poet is a Shakepeare, Shelley, or Keats . No. But I still think that the poet is one hell of a creative artist.

As usual you are spot on with your review BR. I enjoyed watching the movie and it touched me like the way probably even Kahaani didn’t. I think it did have a bit of The Artist in it. I had liked that movie too. I feel the silences in these movies were so profound and the back ground score so appropriate, that it elevates the movie to a different viewing experience, in spite of a few lapses in the story line.

@vivekgupta, i would not consider a poet who creates poetry by copying stanza’s from different poets as an artist at all. at best he is a technician who is good at creating a product by clobbering together imagery from real artists. there was something inherently fake about the final product in barfi, the parts did not make a harmonius whole, the essence of indianness was missing. it was obviously a hack job , at least for me and did not touch me in the least.

Felt bad when I saw the ransom note is still a copy from movie “sympathy for Mr.vengeance”. Turns out , as I watch more and more world movies, something or other is a copy from some movies. Many said it is inspired from…, but I would say it is plagiarized big time